u/HiTork

"Ugh, every week there's a canal."

"Or an inlet."

"Or a fjord."

"Quiet! I won't hear another word against the boat."

That is the Simpsons family above pointing out how there are convenient plot points every episode so Knight Boat can some how fit in every week. Knight Rider may not have been as blatant about it, but I realized there are only so many types of plots you can feature KITT in on the basis of being a car, and I've noticed some of them repeat.

The one that sticks in my mind as of this writing are the episodes where KITT enters some sort of automobile race to solve some sort of ulterior crime mystery. Then there are the times where KITT is reprogramed to be evil, or when he gets destroyed/heavily damaged and repaired.

I feel this may have been what ultimately killed Knight Rider, people got tired of seeing the same things even if the stunts were impressive. I struggle to see how many more seasons KR may have lasted had they been renewed after season 4, maybe one or two?

Jumped the Shark - a term used to denote the moment a TV show got bad.

Most notably unlike previous Jeeps, it had a unibody design, coil springs, and all around independent suspension.

In the early Knight Rider episode "Give Me Liberty... Or Give Me Death", Michael and KITT enter an automotive race featuring vehicles running on alternative fuels. One of the competitor vehicles is an orange Dodge Charger driven by the Prince brothers, the engine being converted to run on moonshine (clearly a jab at The Dukes of Hazzard).

Anyways, the Prince brother's car had a bomb planted in it (the race was being sabotaged, and KITT and Michael were assigned to find out why) and the antagonists blow it up remotely. The initial explosion scenes show a Charger exploding, but when Michael runs to the burning car to try and save the Prince brothers (spoiler: there was nothing he could do), it is clearly not a Charger and some other car (appears to be Mopar).

I wonder if they ran out of Chargers to wreck during filming, or if they wanted to salvage the valuable Charger and not have it burn to the ground, putting the fire out quickly and then moving in the "stunt double" car to torch.